Preface

Abstract

By “crypt study,” I mean to emplace each reading in this dossier in specialized relationship to the “case study” genre. While the metapsychology or system that Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok sought to convey with their reading of the “cryptonymy” of Freud’s case study of the Wolfman has been lost or integrated within the host of re-readings of psychoanalysis after Freud,discrete insights into and images of the melancholic condition surrounding the “crypt” have continued to open condemned sites of identification. With the conclusion of the last sentence, we have already entered, by metaphor, the radically anti-metaphorical status of melancholia’s crypts.